Apparently it doesn't bother her that her husband is an old-fashioned macho man. As long as he lets her use the cooker while he's out.

She's no foodie, but she has just written a cook book, with recipes divided into sections from store cupboard to party food. Don't expect to find Gordon's recipes in there though, it's inspired more by her mum than anyone.

Read an extract of the interview below.

The way most women feel about Tana Ramsay depends largely upon how they feel about her husband, Gordon. If you're one of those who thinks that the chef is a sexist, foulmouthed bully with a wonky face and silly hair, she probably has your deepest sympathy. But you may be in the minority. The terrible truth is that many women find Ramsay oddly attractive, even if they can't quite explain why. These women are doubtless rather envious of poor Tana - and are likely to grow more so when they read her new book, Tana Ramsay's Family Kitchen. It's one of those sleek volumes that seems to offer up not only recipes, but a whole lifestyle. On the cover, Mrs Ramsay looks healthy and happy - a smiley cheerleader for a certain brand of four-wheel-drive domesticity. Inside, it's worse. Look at her children, all four of them, as cute as candy - not to mention their colourful after-Boden wellies, their cosy duffle coats, their adorable little knitted sweaters. In most of the pictures, they appear to be rushing round the kitchen making just the right amount of mess with Mummy's cake mixture. Oh dear. It all looks intimidatingly perfect.

Mention this to Tana, and she shudders at the thought. When she first started writing recipes for a weekly magazine, the impulse was: 'If I can do it, anyone can.' And now that she has written a book, nothing has changed. The last thing she wants is to present herself as a vision of perfection. 'I wanted to simplify everything right down,' she says. 'The recipes come from me and my mum, from friends and family, not some home economist. That's because I was determined that it should be real, that it be full of things that people can actually do. I wasn't at all interested in telling people the ideal.' She is not, she is keen to point out, what you might call a foodie. You will not find her poaching quails' eggs of an evening - though, of course, like anyone, she loves to eat out. In fact, before she had children, when Gordon was working late in his kitchen, she barely cooked at all. 'Girls can survive on a slice of toast when they're on their own, can't they?' she says. 'Or whatever's in the fridge. I only began to get interested after my children were born. Suddenly, it was important to me - what I was putting in their mouths. Then, when I started writing things down, I realised that I knew a lot more than I first thought.'

Her book is divided into sections, from breakfast to store cupboard to party food. The recipes are healthy without being too pious, and designed with the chaos of children in mind (cups of soup for cold days, ice cream for hot; there is even a recipe for play dough). None of them requires hours of preparation. But Tana's own favourites are those she can serve the children at tea time, and then adjust for Gordon and herself later: yes, she does cook for them both, and presumably puts up with any stick that may come her way. Gordon has, she says, been completely supportive about the book, for all that he likes to joke about how it isn't cooking at all (ask him about her book, and he'll make inverted comma signs in the air). Does she fear other people will say that she is just cashing in on his name? She's quite straightforward about this. 'I'd be stupid if I thought that Gordon wasn't the reason I'd been asked to do it. But I can either dwell on that, and worry what people are going to say, or I can get on with it.'

The Ramsays live in a house of embassy proportions in Wandsworth, southwest London: you may have seen it on the telly (it looms large in Gordon's Channel 4 series, The F-Word; in series one, he kept chickens in its football pitch-sized back garden, and in series two, some pigs). The legend goes that the kitchen upstairs - which cost some £500,000 to install and features a professional oven - is Gordon's domain, with Tana confined to 'an MFI job' deep in the basement. This, she tells me, is a myth. She uses the main kitchen too, and, in fact, there are gadgets that Gordon has no idea how to use, including the coffee machine. Mention his fondness for slagging off the kitchen skills of women (his favourite moan is that most of us can't, or won't, cook), and she rolls her eyes. 'He does it to get a rise out of people,' she says. 'React, and you're giving him the response he's after. You're egging him on. The other night, we were at a party. He was talking to two women. I could see it in their eyes: they had no idea how to take him. Afterwards, I heard one of them say to the other: "He must be on coke or something to get that worked up".'

In person, Tana is very pretty, very brown and very slim (a runner, her greatest luxury is to pound the streets). Hard not to feel like a blob in her presence. But the over-riding impression she leaves is of her loyalty to her husband. No sooner has she had a critical thought about him, than she is berating herself out loud for her selfishness. The two of them, however, could not be more different - or at least, could not be from more different backgrounds. While Gordon grew up mostly on council estates, and suffered at the hands of his abusive father, Tana's childhood sounds to have been idyllic. Her father was a successful businessman (these days, he is the CEO of Gordon Ramsay Holdings), and she and her siblings grew up on a Kent farm within commuting distance of London, where he worked during the week. Her mother kept chickens and sheep. 'We didn't care about things like clothes,' she says. 'I was a real tomboy. It was amazing. We'd clear out of the door at nine o'clock in the morning, and didn't come back until we were hungry. With my own children, I'm obsessed with knowing where they are, who they're with. You have to be. But it's so sad.'